Luke 15:1-11 The God who searches for us

You could reword the
second of these stories: not ‘there was a widow who lost a coin’, but there was
a chaplain who lost his passport ..

I think I get it from my
mother. She told me that on one occasion she left me in the pram outside a shop
in the village where we lived She came out of the shop and walked home. It was
only when she got home that she realised something was missing.

There is a verse where God
asks, ‘Can a woman forget her child’, to which the answer in my mother’s case
is very definitely yes!

The good news for all of
us forgotten babies is that the verse continues: “Even these may forget, yet I
will not forget you.” (Isaiah 49:15)

So what does this passage
tell us about God?

1. We belong to God and
he misses us.

You know that you belong,
someone said, when they miss you if you are not there.

The sheep belongs to the
shepherd, and the shepherd notices that he has gone

That is quite something. I
mean to me all sheep look the same.

But the shepherd knew one
was missing.

Maybe he counts … Somebody
is missing. It is Cecil. Cecil has gone AWOL.

When you go to theological
college and they teach you how to become a vicar or pastor, they tell you that
a person can usually be a pastor for up to 40 people. They can get to know 40
people, care for 40 people, and they will notice if one of those 40 is missing.

But when a congregation
grows to about 100 or 120, it then becomes very difficult to notice if someone
is missing - short of taking a register and calling out people’s names.

That is one of the reasons
why churches tend to grow – as we have – to about 100 or 120, and then stop
growing. It is harder to feel that you belong if someone does not miss you.
That is why, if churches are to grow beyond that number, they need to either
have a second congregation (emerging on a Wednesday), or you have small groups.
So that even if the pastor doesn’t miss you, there are people who see if you
are not there.

The good news is that
mothers may forget their babies, pastors will forget their people, but God will
not forget you.

And he is not limited to
40 people.

God is God of the
universe, of all creation – of all people, who lived then, who live now, and
who will live then – and yet he knows you personally. He created each of us to
be in communion, to have intimacy with him. And when you are not in communion
with him, when you are alienated from him, cut off from him, he misses you.

2. God searches for you

It is not God who has
mislaid us, but we who have wandered away from God.

That is clear in the first
of the two stories Jesus tells here. The sheep has clearly wandered off.

It is also true of the third
story in Luke 15: which we haven’t read today.

That it is about two sons.

The first rejects his
father and goes to a far away place;

The second stays at home
but – at the end of the story – refuses to go in to be with his father.

We have rejected God and walked
away from God.

We have rejected God and
refuse ‘to go in’ to be with him.

In other words, God created
us to be in a relationship with God; he created us to become like God. But we have
chosen to walk away from God, to turn our back on God

We chose to live for the
visible.

Augustine tells the story
of the lover who gives to his beloved a necklace. It is a beautiful necklace. It
was made for her. And it is exquisite, and of astonishing value. £57m. When she
wears the necklace other people look at her, and admire her and respect her. And
the beloved falls in love with the necklace, but she turns her back on the lover.

I don’t think that I
really need to explain that parable – but I’m going to!

The God who loves us has
given us this amazing creation. He has given us life and beauty and creativity
and truth and each other. But instead of desiring the one who has given us life
and beauty and creativity and truth, we have chosen instead to desire what he
has given us. We have fallen in love with the gift and we have turned our back
on the giver.

And because we have turned
our back on God, we are – whether we think it or not – lost.

We are rootless – because
if you take God out of the picture there can be no ultimate value and no
ultimate morality. If you take God out of the picture, then a mosquito has the
same value as you. And the only reason we think that we are better is because
we can squash a mosquito, and a mosquito cannot squash us.

We try to live as little
kings and queens – each with our own empire. We play the game of thrones.

In the book of Judges in
the bible, we are told of the early days of Israel, when the people of God had
settled in the land. And there is chaos. It ends with mass rape and genocide: with
the strongest imposing their will on the weakest. And there is a recurring
refrain throughout the book of Judges: in those days there was no king in
Israel and each person did what seemed fit.

And if you take God out of
the picture, then it really is the survival of the fittest: the will to power
wins.

And if we try to live
without God, we lose hope. For if there is no God, then this universe is not
‘creation’ but ‘happenation’. It was not created; it happened. There is no
reason for anything. Things just are – things that we call good and the bad.
And how can we dare to call something good and something bad? We are beyond
good and evil.

And certainly there is no
destiny – apart from the fate of the universe: which is either to end in a
massive explosion, the big bang that will end all bangs; or which will end in
the big freeze – everything drifting away from everything else and becoming
colder and colder.

At the heart of Dante’s
hell there is not fire, but a frozen wasteland of ice tombs.

Whatever, without God, the
only hope that we have is the hope of death.

There may be times when we
feel lost, and other times when we don’t feel lost.

But by turning our back on
God we are lost.

Jesus looked on the crowds
coming to him for healing, and we are told that he has compassion on them,
because they are lost and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd.

And so God comes searching
for us.

Like the shepherd looking
for his sheep

Like the woman looking for
her coin

Like the chaplain looking
for his passport

Like the lover looking for
the beloved

He searches for us.

He spoke to us. He gave us
his promises and he taught us his ways. He spoke of his love and he called us
back to him

And when we rejected his
promises, his law and his prophets, God gave us himself.

Jesus, the Son of God, was
born as a human being.

He is the shepherd seeking
his sheep

It cost him everything: he
emptied himself for us; he is the king who knelt down and washed the feet of
his subjects

He spoke of God and of the
Kingdom of God. He called, invited us to come back to God, to live for the
Kingdom and to receive the power of God to come into our lives.

He call us to look at the
giver and not the gift

And this is the shepherd
who gave his life for us.

And God continues to seek
us.

Alexander Men talks of a
poem by Lermontov, ‘The Angel’. It speaks of the soul being brought by angels
to earth to be born. And even though we forget our origin, and turn our back on
the invisible, yet there remains within us echoes of the singing of the angels.

And sometimes, just
sometimes, we allow ourselves to hear that voice, the voice of the shepherd
calling us.

We are told in the bible
that God has set eternity in the hearts of men and women.

There are those moments
when something breaks in, something bigger than us, something from outside of
us, and we are touched by the desire to know the lover who gave us this world
and who gave us himself.

I urge you that if you
hear that voice, don’t squash it. Listen to him.

The shepherd is seeking
you. Repent. Turn back to him. Allow yourself to be found.

3. God delights when we
turn back to him.

This is the main reason
that Jesus told these stories.

The religious leaders were
grumbling, muttering because Jesus was eating with people who were sinners and
tax collectors:

And so Jesus tells them of
the joy of God when sinners turn back to him in repentance.

'The shepherd places the sheep over his shoulders and rejoices'

V7: ‘Just so, I tell you,
there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over
ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance’

V10: ‘Just so, I tell you,
there is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents’.

When a person, when you,
stop running – and listen to the voice of the shepherd who is calling you: you
know when that is happening – it is when the outer voice (from here, the bible)
and the inner voice are saying the same thing – and when we turn back to God,
there is a party in heaven!

Maybe it is the first time
that you have repented: you have chosen to come to God, to say sorry for your
sins, to live for him and for his kingdom and to ask him to come into your
life. That is a great thing, a momentous event. It is a new birth. People speak
of being born again – not physically but spiritually. You have come spiritually
alive.

Or maybe you are
spiritually alive, but you’ve been living as someone who is dead. And you hear
again the call of God. And you repent, turn back to God.

When we do that, there is
joy in heaven.

‘I’ve found my passport’

‘I’ve found the lost coin’

‘I’ve found my precious
precious sheep’

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